Just noticed that when Rip gets the minutes that he used to get, we have been a decent team. We actually have a playoff type winning percentage when he plays.

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If he plays like he has since returning from the eastern front and unlike he has really for the last couple years he is still a great player. If you could tell me he would play this hard on both ends of the court for the rest of his contract I'd say keep him and send BG on his way...... I fear that Rip is only on his best behavior for the rest of this year.

If he goes to a team that is chasing a title next year (knock on wood) I think he has alot to give. He needs to be on a good team though, and we won't be that team next year.

In hindsight, I'm thinking that we should have played Wilcox more.
Prince confirming his status as a glue guy (shows up in the advanced stats more than the regular ones).
Stuckey showing up in the top 3 in just about everything.

Ben Wallace is basically retired and he still led the team in 3 categories.

Stuckey shot .386 on J's this year vs. .372 last year (so his shot improved!).

Most people that have watched him play for 4 years don't see Stuckey as a PG.

Stuckey: He’s an average player who acts like he’s a superstar. Kuester is not a good coach and probably will be fired. But Stuckey has done nothing in this league to give him the right to lord over any coach. His supporters point to the fact that he has played well since he was reinserted into the lineup. I point to his first four years in the league and wonder which is the bigger sample size. Maybe he’ll blossom into a better player elsewhere, but he has insulted the Pistons franchise and their fans for the final time, in my book. But like Hamilton, I think he’ll return, especially if Joe Dumars returns. Dumars sees things in Stuckey I don’t.

Wouldn't you say he's underrated here, considering that most people don't even have him in the "top 5 Pistons you want back next year" list?

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The thread asked to set your own rules (i.e. take into account whatever you want- salary, contract length, age, etc).

A lot of the keepers were guys with minimal market value like Summers, White, Ben Gordon, etc. So, I think it mainly came down more to who aren't you sick of. Stuckey has been the starting point guard on a losing team with mutiny issues. Most of the starters are left off of various peoples' lists. The starters haven't shown good leadership this year to say the least.

When you're trying to rebuild, you need to start developing cohesiveness.

Some guy hacked the apbrmetrics forum over att sonicscentral.com and it seems they had no backups. A few of the guys are bringing back a some of the threads from the Google cache but a lot of insightful knowledge lost.

** they didn't have the Finals MVP in Bill Russell's heyday, so he can easily be added to the list as well since he would have had many. Bob Pettit, Bob Cousy, and Oscar Robertson also might have been on this list.

So, Dirk is in a pretty exclusive club, but is on the bottom of the list.
And of the guys on this list, Dirk is the only player could didn't and could not have played for Team USA. Duncan and Hakeem were born outside the US, but played for America.

A nice interview with former Pistons front office employee Jeff Weltman. It sounds like the Pistons let a gem go.

Some thoughts from the Detroit Bad Boys about the interview:

It's a good read, albeit a bittersweet one for Pistons fans. It's impossible to say for sure just how much Joe Dumars values advanced stats, but looking at Detroit's list of personnel moves ever since Hammond left town, it's safe to say he's either looking at the wrong numbers or (more likely) valuing his gut over empirical evidence.

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I like this assessment by Weltman, it sounds reasonable to me:

The league is no different than any other industry, in that it is subject to trends and phases and fads. And the initial reaction to any fad is to go the other way, is to resist change. But once it has infiltrated and become part of the establishment, it becomes less threatening and people get to understand it.

What tends to happens then is people start to go overboard on it, and then there is a pullback. And I think that is kind of the cycle we have seen with analytics. And I think the next cycle we are going to say that with is technology.

I think there are going to be tremendous advances technologically, even from where we are now, to what teams are going to able to do. And I am sure you are aware of all of these different programs and services that are becoming available. And I think as those things become more accessible and understandable to all of us laymen, that they will become more accepted and more popular. And then there will probably be a pullback on that. And then something else will come along. But I think we have seen that we have seen that same sort of curve with analytics.